I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Interpretation
The quote reflects skepticism about the positive aspects of American culture and questions the future of aesthetic appreciation.
In this quote, Philip Roth expresses his disillusionment with American culture, suggesting that he struggles to identify any uplifting qualities within it. His statement about aesthetic literacy points to a broader concern regarding the value placed on art and beauty in society, implying that such appreciation may diminish over time in America.
In practice
This quote can be used during a discussion on the state of modern art in America.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.
I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.
People, human beings with all their creative diversity, are the makers of history.
The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
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